Swine Flu Peak Concern

Alejandro Martinez Gallardo wrote to suggest we look at the
widespread concern about a possible flu pandemic.

I live in Mexico and
experienced, as the government gave news of
the swine flu virus, a collective mind panic
as I have never before seen. I know it is
hard to pinpoint the event to a specific
time, but I am sure that somewhere between
April 23 and 26 would yield very interesting
data. I think the project does not have eggs
in Mexico, but probably the data would
reflect some kind of widespread disturbance
worthy of analysis.

And later, in response to my indication we need a more
sharply focused time:

I would have to say "the
collective mind panic" would be identified best on Friday
April 24, when the news of the swine flu had spread and people were
jumping into conclusions with paranoid ease. That would be during
the day like from 11 am to 20 pm Central Time. I might
be "stretching" it here but I think it might result in interesting data.
Well, if you have time and do run the analysis, I really would like to
see it and perhaps write something about it.

The GCP event was defined using Alejandro's suggestions. The
resulting Chisquare is 32525.557 on 32400 df, for a
probability of 0.310 and corresponding Z of 0.495. This
result is moderately positive, and indeed might reflect the
widespread and developing anxiety, but given the difficulty
of testing for such a diffuse event, it is also reasonable to
interpret the result as random fluctuation.

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.